Rambo: First Blood (1982)

I saw this, in the company of an almost exclusively male audience, in a special event showing (read: promotion for Rambo DVD boxed-set) at our local Regal Cinema. If you read these pages regularly you know I’m going through a Sly Stallone kick, and having not previously seen any of the Rambo movies, thought it appropriate to start this series out in the theater, as the option was open to me. Rambo is really the flip side of Rocky, as Stallone himself points out in an interview that preceded the showing of the film. While Rocky is an optimist, Rambo is a pessimist. A member of an elite Green Beret task force during the Vietnam War, Rambo is the last surveyor of his unit (the only other one to have made it out of the war alive, had succumb to cancer). Harassed by Brian Dennehy, the assholian sheriff of a small pacific-north western town, Rambo experiences some sever ‘post traumatic stress’, and takes to playing the war out in the little corner of Washington state where he finds himself. There’s a lot of survivalist cum guerilla warfare type action, but the script injects just enough internal human agony into the Rambo character to have it taken seriously. A kind of Grind house film with a conscience. I’s liked it good, 4 out of 5 (for its social significance) . The alternate ending shown after the film sucked.